APRIL 3: Meeting at Parks Office

About a dozen people met in the Mural room and Mike Stevens and Ryan Duffy gave us an update on park activities.

Mike explained in much detail the events of the January Northern Grampians Complex fire. On Jan 15 several lightening strikes started fires across the Grampians, Parks, CFA and DEPI staff worked hard to put these fires out, but inaccessibility and bad weather lead to a couple of fires in the Wartook area not being able to be controlled. Mike described to us how events unfolded and showed us a program called Phoenix Rapidfire which illustrated how the fire progressed. The program had been used during the fire to predict the fire behaviour and to give people warning of the likely path it would affect. Phoenix Rapidfire was developed after the 2006 bushfires and has been improved each year as more information from each fire season is fed into the model.

On the extreme weather days planned burns 3 years and older had no effect on slowing the fire front.

Ryan Duffy cultural and natural values ranger updated us on animals which have been captured on cameras around the park, the Brush tailed Rock Wallaby program and the use of trained dogs to sniff out Quoll scats. See Ryans article for more details.

After the meeting we had a meal together and made a few decisions: FOGGs will put in an application for ‘Communities for Nature’ grant for a fence around the Caladenia audasii site in the Ironbarks.

We have run out of FOGGs membership application forms and will start looking into getting them reprinted. We allocated up to $2000 dollars and a print run of 1000 to 2000.